A sententious black servant in maroon livery and a bright worsted waistcoat announced dinner from the foot of the terrace, and they moved slowly toward the house.  There was a concerted interest in the faces they found already about the table.  Howat took his seat at his mother’s side, Gilbert Penny assisted Mrs. Winscombe.  David was placed between Caroline and Myrtle.  Mr. Winscombe, again formally wigged and coated, was absorbed in thought.  He said to his hostess, “It’s the uncertainty that puts me in doubt.  Ogle thought the thing thoroughly reviewed, when now Hamilton comes out with his damned Indians and Maryland rum.  Forsythe suggests my presence in Council to-morrow, and it’s barely possible that there will be a return to Annapolis.  While Ludowika—­”

“I can’t travel another ell over the atrocities they call roads here,” Mrs. Winscombe declared.  “I expect to die returning to England as it is, and I won’t put up with any more preliminary torment.  You’ll have to leave me.”

“At Myrtle Forge,” Gilbert Penny added at once; “at Myrtle Forge as long as you like.  Unless,” he added with a smile, “you prefer the gaiety at Abner Forsythe’s.”  A hot colour suffused David’s cheeks.

Mr. Winscombe bowed over the table, “I am inclined to take advantage of that.  Ludowika would be the better without even Quaker gaiety for a little.”  He stopped, turned toward her.  “I’d like it immensely,” she replied simply.  “I am sure it would give me back all that I’ve lost in passage.  Perhaps,” she leaned forward, smiling at Howat, “I could see something of what’s behind those hills, go into the real Arcadia.”

“Out there,” said Mr. Penny, “are the Endless Mountains.”

The faint, involuntary chill again invaded Howat; suddenly an unfamiliar imagery attached to the commonplace phrase uttered by his father—­the Endless Mountains!  It brought back his doubt, his questioning, of life.  It was the inconceivable term endless, without any finality of ultimate rest, without even the arbitrary peace of death, that appalled him.  He thought of life going on and on, with nothing consummated, nothing achieved nor final.  He thought of the black Penny who had been burned as a heretic to ashes years before; yet Howat was conscious of the martyr’s bitter stubbornness of soul, alive, still alive and unquenched, in himself.  He wondered about the heritage to come.  There was a further belief that it followed exclusively the male line.  The Pennys, like many another comparatively obscure name, went far back into the primeval soil of civilization.  If he had no issue the endlessness might be confounded; a fatality in his long, dangerous excursions would have vanquished the ineradicable Welsh blood.  He might have no children; yesterday he would have made such a decision; but now he was less sure of himself, of his power to will.  He was dimly conscious of vast exterior forces and traitorous factors within.  It was as if momentarily he had been lifted to a cloud beyond time, from which he saw the entire, stumbling progress of humanity, its beginning hid in humid mist, moving into a nocturnal shadow like a thunder bank.